Folding and One Straight Cut Suffice [pdf] (1999) | Hacker News Reader

Folding and One Straight Cut Suffice [pdf] (1999)

imsc.res.in

110 pointsdownboots19 comments

Every time something like this comes up, I recall “office hours” with David Huffman at UC Santa Cruz. Most of the conversation was about things other than class. One frequent topic was his paper folding.

https://mitmuseum.mit.edu/collections/collection/david-a-huf...

I took Huffman's class "Cybernetics" (we never discussed origami) which was pretty fun. It's the only CS class I ever took in college, and the only class I failed (his tests were hard). The class was filled with interesting tidbits of information theory and random interesting math problems like sphere packing.

Cybernetics, if I recall rightly, was a “multidisciplinary (80 series when I was there) class, no?

His classes were my favorite because he was one of the few profs that really didn’t sugar coat things and appreciated those that put effort in.

Well, this was 1993 so my memory may be faulty but I believe it was a CS class (or maybe math?)

I put the effort in but he didn't appreciate me. I still got a lot of out of the course, though: the imposter syndrome it gave me made me work extra hard to learn actual CS I needed to be successful later in my career.

He was a hardass. I had a class with an acquiantence/friend (who went on to found two start ups) and failed is 103a class the first time around with Huffman. We caught Huffman in a mistake and gave back as good as he gave. It was a fun time. Learned a lot.

Full paper: https://erikdemaine.org/papers/JCDCG98/paper.pdf

(1999)

Not that a mathematically pure idea like this is affected by the date.

True, but sometimes the reader should be.

If you like the Demaines' work, you'll probably like the award-winning PBS documentary Between The Folds [0] which features them and many other amazing people working with origami.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DiIr7du6Y3w

The MIT link I shared mentioned Demaine studied Huffman's work but the mini and full paper make no reference. I first heard about this from Huffman when Demaine was about 16 years old. So I would hope for some reference there in.

Simpler papers from a more refined time. Beautiful!

I don’t think this is the full paper, though.

Why? There’s shorter ones.

Because it says "In the full version of this paper[4], we prove [...]".

It's not actually the full paper; they cite the full paper with [4], as containing the proof of Theorem 1.

Full paper: https://erikdemaine.org/papers/JCDCG98/paper.pdf

Note the authors are Erik Demaine, his father and his doctoral adviser.

Erik was born in 1981.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_Demaine

Powerful

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